Issue #167

Feb 2 2017

Editor Picks

Unlearning descriptive statistics
If you've ever used an arithmetic mean, a Pearson correlation or a standard deviation to describe a dataset, I'm writing this for you. Better numbers exist to summarize location, association and spread: numbers that are easier to interpret and that don't act up with wonky data and outliers...

Rapping-neural-networkI made this for my high school's programming club. It's a neural network that has been trained on rap songs, and can rearrange any lyrics you feed it into a song that rhymes and has a flow...

Deep Learning Dead LanguagesIt is a tingling sense of presence in the room, when I finally press play on the generated audio file, and hear my trained deep-learning neural net try to formulate new and never before spoken sentences in a language where the last fluent speaker passed away in 2003...

Astronomers explore uses for AI-generated images
In recent years, neural networks have made huge strides in learning to recognize and interpret information in pictures, videos and speech. But now, computer scientists such as Clune are turning those artificial-intelligence (AI) systems on their heads to create ‘generative’ networks that churn out their own realistic-seeming information...

Google Play Store: Machine Learning to Fight Spam and Abuse at ScaleIn Part 1 and Part 2 of this series on app discovery, we discussed using machine learning to gain a deeper understanding of the topics associated with an app, and a deep learning framework to provide personalized recommendations. In this post, we discuss a machine learning approach to fight spam and abuse on apps section of the Google Play Store, making it a safe and trusted app platform for more than a billion Android users...

NeuroEvolution on Autonomous Car Pathing
The development of autonomous vehicles is an exciting technology that has really taken off in recent years. As a F1 fan and software developer I was especially inspired by this technology and wanted to see if I could introduce some principles of autosports into a basic self-driving model. The goal of this project was to create an autonomous driving model capable of finding the optimal racing line using neural networks optimized through genetic algorithms...

Data Science and DevOps: A Success StoryBecause of the role as a decision making system, data science has to be in the core of the business processes. This fact brings a whole bunch of serious problems and some of them, especially those of cultural nature can be catastrophic. Half-hearted attempts lead to a waste of time and money – at best – and nourish data science’s reputation as a troublemaker. Properly integrated data science, however, is a game changer you cannot afford to ignore. Embrace data science with a DevOps mindset...

CommAI: Evaluating the first steps towards a useful general AIWith machine learning successfully applied to new daunting problems almost every day, general AI starts looking like an attainable goal. However, most current research focuses instead on important but narrow applications, such as image classification or machine translation. We believe this to be largely due to the lack of objective ways to measure progress towards broad machine intelligence. In order to fill this gap, we propose here a set of concrete desiderata for general AI, together with a platform to test machines on how well they satisfy such desiderata...

Jobs

Do you want to contribute to making the leading global logistics company more data-driven? If so, join our growing central Data Analytics Team of Deutsche Post DHL Group. We work with our operative departments to solve concrete business problems by using mathematical methods, such as time series analysis, Operations Research methods and machine learning. You will build analytical models to answer a wide variety of questions. For example, you will predict daily shipment volumes for accurate operational capacity planning, and you will handle the real-time optimization of costs and utilization of our global transport network, which includes more than 200 countries.

You should have a deep knowledge of statistics and/or mathematical optimization, be skilled in scripting languages (Python, R) and be experienced in SQL. We are looking for energetic and success-oriented problem solvers who are comfortable explaining complex analytical and technical content to various audiences....

Training & Resources

Million requests per second with PythonJapronto is a brand new micro-framework tailored for your micro-services needs. It’s main goals include being fast, scalable and lightweight. It lets you do synchronous and asynchronous programming with asyncio and it’s shamelessly fast. Even faster than NodeJS and Go...

Books

"This book takes what can be a daunting and complex subject and breaks it down with a series of easy to follow examples which buildup to deliver a great overall explanation of how to use Bayes Theorem for basic analysis and even off-the-cuff critical thinking"...